At the start of 2009, I warned “Uh Oh — I Smell Yet Another Pathetic Gatsby Remake.” Sadly, I may have been all too prescient:

As Tom Shillue wrote at the time at Big Hollywood:

According to this story in the Guardian, Hollywood is geared up and ready for the recession, and it seems they are eager to entertain us with a series of big-budget “I told you so’s”.

Baz Luhrmann is all set to mount a re-make of The Great Gatsby because, according to him, “People will need an explanation of where we are and where we’ve been, and The Great Gatsby can provide that explanation.”

Oh, boy. Here we go again. Do I really need another lesson in why the American dream is a charade, and our materialism leads to emptiness and despair? I’ve heard this all before.

The time it takes to complete a film can do strange things to its message. What might have seemed like a warning about economic excess at the start of the Obama administration can now be viewed by many as a cautionary tale about the identikit persona of Mr. Obama himself, and a reminder of the blindness of those who eagerly followed him. Regarding the former, Mark Steyn wrote in his latest column:

“I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then,” says Nick Carraway in “The Great Gatsby.” “His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people – his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself… . So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

In a post-modern America, the things that Gatsby attempted to fake – an elite schooling – Obama actually had; the things that Gatsby attempted to obscure – the impoverished roots – merely add to Obama’s luster. Gatsby claimed to have gone to Oxford, but nobody knew him there because he never went; Obama had a million bucks’ worth of elite education at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law, and still nobody knew him (“Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him”). In that sense, Obama out-Gatsbys Gatsby: His “shiftless and unsuccessful” relatives – the deportation-dodging aunt on public housing in Boston, the DWI undocumented uncle, the $12-a-year brother back in Nairobi – are useful props in his story, the ever more vivid bit-players as the central character swims ever more out of focus, but they don’t seem to know him either. The more autobiographies he writes, the less anybody knows.

Like Gatsby presiding over his wild, lavish parties, Obama is aloof and remote: let everyone else rave deliriously; he just has to be. He is, in his way, the apotheosis of the Age of American Incredibility. When just being who you are anyway is an incredible accomplishment, Obama managed to run and win on biography almost entirely unmoored from life. But then, like Gatsby, he knew a thing or two about “the unreality of reality.”

To borrow from one of Gatsby’s most famous scenes, the shirts have no emperor. Though one huge difference: attendance at Gatsby’s wild parties was entirely voluntary. We’re all trapped in Obama’s cocktail party until at least November. And whatever happens then, we’ll be working off the hangover for quite some time to come.

But back to the film itself. My first thought while watching the above trailer was, to paraphrase the perceptive veteran film critics Beavis and Butt-head, this really sucks — but it sucks in unique ways we’ve never seen before. Or actually, we have; the same problems that plague Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator — killer production design, great wardrobe, phony looking CGI, and the same unbelievable lead are at work here as well. Here’s what I wrote in 2005:

Over the summer, I finally caught The Aviator. Wonderful 1930s and ’40s production design, but its casting reminded me why I skipped it on the big screen in the first place. There was simply no way I could buy the babyfaced perpetual child-man Leonardo DiCaprio as business tycoon Howard Hughes. He simply lacked the gravitas to play the character, despite the fact that at 30, DiCaprio is only a few years younger than Hughes himself was at the start of the era depicted in Scorsese’s picture.

(Incidentally, could you imagine DiCaprio as the title character in Citizen Kane? And yet Orson Welles was actually four years younger than DiCaprio when he played Charles Foster Kane.)

It isn’t entirely DiCaprio’s fault; just about every Hollywood period movie made post-Brat Pack suffers from the same problem. (For example, the Dorthy Parker film from 1994 with Jennifer Jason Leigh in the title role, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, comes immediately to mind. At least in Titanic, DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were supposed to be callow youths, and were surrounded by an army of veteran character actors.)

Pages: 1 2 | 48 Comments

The Washington Post regrets to inform its readers that the presidential candidate it was deep in the tank for in 2008 may be in trouble this time around:

[I]t is a rearview-mirror assessment that could hurt Obama’s chances for a second term. One key indicator has hardly budged this year: Asked where they stand financially compared with when Obama took office in January 2009, 30 percent say they are worse off, and only 16 percent say they are better off. There is not a widespread sense that things would be better had Romney been president for the past three-plus years, but for the incumbent it is a critical measure. On this question, Obama’s numbers continue to resemble those of George H.W. Bush, who lost his bid for reelection in 1992 amid a flagging economy.

At the moment, his campaign is giving off a similar tone as well, isn’t it? Meanwhile, Bush #43-era Secretary of State Colin Powell is having second thoughts about supporting Obama again as he did in 2008, leading Glenn Reynolds to write, “You don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing: Not when you can watch a weathervane like Colin Powell, anyway.”

Oh, and let us recall “Obama’s Bush #41 Scanner Moment,” from April of last year:

“If he were a Republican, this would be his ‘Bush (41) meets a grocery scanner moment.’ But he’s not, so it is quietly buried.”

– A commenter at Ann Althouse’s blog responding to Obama’s punitive tone yesterday in the latter half of the above video, when confronted with questions over his Carteresque gas policy, found via Glenn Reynolds. Yes, I know (as does Snopes) that the first President Bush wasn’t surprised by a supermarket scanner — as the former head of the CIA, and a man who these days routinely skydives in his 80s, one would assume he’s well acquainted with technology.

* * * * *

But at the Tatler, Bryan Preston has a nifty suggestion to drive its viewership much higher:

Note to the RNC: Download this video and mash it up with the Obama “under my plan energy prices will necessarily skyrocket” clip. Together they prove that this president cares much more about social engineering than about the economy or how his own policies are hurting Americans every single day. This video is President Obama’s Marie Antoinette moment: He tells a man who complains about high gas prices to buy a new car. Think about that for a second. The man is worried that gas prices are eating him alive. Obama’s response is to needle him to spend more money. That’s the response of an elitist jerk, not a leader who understands or even cares about the damage his policies are doing to the country. If that’s not indicative of this president’s arrogant and out-of-touch mindset, I don’t know what is. Hat tip to InstaPundit, who also has a screen shot of the AP story about this remarks, a story that AP eventually scrubbed to remove the remarks. So there’s a story about media bias in the mix as well.

In 2008, the media were happy to let Obama walk on water, to borrow a line from then-Newsweek editor Jon Meacham. But back then, all of anger from Obama, the MSM and the left could be channeled into a single direction: BUSH SUX.

In 2012, Obama will have to defend his own record as president — a challenge made all the more difficult by having to live up to the canonization the media performed on him before he took office. Can he win? Sure. But it’s going to be a much uglier process no matter what happens. And as with yesterday, we’re going to see many more examples highlighting that his bitter clingers rhetoric in 2008 was no accident — he really is that contemptuous of the people he’s deigned to govern.

Similarly, while all of Obama’s promises come with expiration dates (sort of like the key moments in his life story), Obama has his own “read my lips” moment to live down, a la GHWB:

Steve Green has had lots of fun with this pledge over the past three years. Or to put it another way — “Pay up, suckers.”

(WaPo article found via Orrin Judd, who adds, “And it didn’t matter for GHWB that the economy was improving” in ’92.)

Related: And then there are all of the down-ticket races in November.

More:  “Uhhh….Uhhh…Uhhhh….Uhhhh…”

2 Comments

Shorter Cory Booker on Sunday: Team Obama’s attacks on Romney and Bain are ‘crap.’

Shorter Cory Booker on Monday: Barack Obama is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.

Shorter Obama administration flack: No, we did not have conversational relations with that man, Cory Booker.

Shorter Obama administration supporters on Twitter: Go #&#@&@* yourself, Cory!

Related: “Ten ways you know the Bain attack is bombing.”

More: “Guess who got the most private-equity money in 2008?“

1 Comment

During the election year of 2004, the New York Times attempted to help get John Kerry over the finish line by excusing Dan Rather’s hit job on George Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard as “fake but accurate,” and a classic Orwellian meme was born. The Hill’s Bernie Quigley is eager to do similar damage control for Elizabeth “1/32nd American Indian” Warren:

The first poetic vision of Europeans in the new world was that of James Fenimore Cooper, who conjured Natty Bumpo. He had an “Indian name” — he had several: Hawkeye, Deerslayer, Pathfinder — indicating that he had been “reborn” in the new world in the Indian spirit. It is the oldest and most important myth in the American canon of our folklore, from Lone Ranger, who died and became “born again” via agency of an Indian shaman, and Fox Mulder, who returned from the dead via Indian intercession in “The X Files,” born anew with the past burned away in death, to enter a new age under the flag of the White Buffalo.

So Warren’s claim to be “part Indian” is correct in mythical terms. Every old-school white Oklahoman is in this regard even if this is nominally not true.

As highlighted by Ace of Spades (read the whole thing, he’s having lots of fun here), who quips in response:

It’s not a lie for me to want to be George Clooney. But if I begin writing checks signed “George Clooney,” I’m pretty sure we’ve exited the realm of the “mythic imagination.”

Elizabeth Warren was noted as a “minority woman of color” at Harvard.

She displaced a minority woman of color — one whose status as a minority woman of color was more than “mythic” or “poetical.”

OK, back to Quigley for more “nominally not true”-style riffing:

So Warren’s claim to be “part Indian” is correct in mythical terms. Every old-school white Oklahoman is in this regard even if this in nominally not true. But it is not a lie to want to be Indian and to imagine your ancestors were. It is to be free of Europeanism. Emerson saw the laggard Europeanism within the Yankee mind as a curse of the unformed American, living half in shadow. It would bring temptation unnatural to us raised free in the forest; fascism, as in Italy, Spain and German, and the perennial virus of French nihilism.

“This just in,” Ace jokes. “Warrior-dominated tribal bands are free of the evils of power by militaristic rule.”

Beyond that, the allusion to Emerson is pretty rich, considering that last fall, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison wrote a book titled American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, which spotlighted Emerson as the one American inspiration of Nietzsche, who in turn was one of the inspirations for fascism, as in Germany, and the perennial virus of nihilism in general.

As Ratner-Rosenhagen wrote:

Nietzsche admired the ease with which Emerson made philosophy an ally of, rather than a retreat from or a corrective to, one’s own experiences and longings. He referred to him as “the excellent [treffliche] Emerson,” largely because he had shown Nietzsche how one can make philosophy “friends with life.” “Nietzsche loved Emerson,” observes Harold Bloom, who regards Nietzsche’s characterization of Emerson “the best comment, that I know, upon the American sage.”

None of the movements that Quigley quotes above were too keen on free market capitalism, and promoted violence in the street when it suited their goals — and funny enough, Warren is OK with those concepts as well. After all, as she said last fall, “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do. I support what they do.”

To be fair, they are “mostly peaceful” — just ask the media. Speaking of fake but accurate, and/or nominally not true.

Related: At Ricochet, a photo essay: “Pretendians: Why is it So Cool to be an Indian?”

2 Comments

In a lengthy article in the New York Post, Kyle Smith compares the intertwined fiscal, demographic and anti-business woes of Greece and California. After the handshakes and initial pleasantries are out of the way, Smith reminds the Golden State and the birthplace of western democracy, “The two of you should have a lot to chat about. Such as what to do when you’re in a burning building with no exits:”

In the absence of clear authority, conditions would be ripe for a strongman to take over Greece. Strongmen tend not to be very nice. A majority of police officers, according to a survey published in the Athens paper The Tribune, voted this month for the neo-Nazi group Golden Dawn.

Lee Harris, writing for the American Enterprise Institute, brings up a crucial point about Greece: In the US, “No one seriously argues that the period of austerity (i.e., recession) was the deliberate policy of this or that administration. But the European austerity programs are the deliberate policy of the governments that have imposed them, and this is a fact that every citizen forced to tighten his belt is perfectly aware of.”

Greeks aren’t going to be waiting patiently in breadlines singing “Brother, Can You Spare a Drachma.” We’re talking about serious rage. Greece may be the cradle of democracy, but its current democracy is only 37 years old. Before that: military rule.

These sound like just the kind of conditions you probably don’t want if your best hope of climbing out of recession is to attract tourists.

Nationalism, which the EU was supposed to cure forever as all member nations joined hands and sang hosannas to Delors, is rising again like heartburn: A left-wing Greek member of parliament declared, “Achtung Frau Merkel. The Greek people want to live free and they don’t want to be under a new occupation from Germany.” A left-wing extremist group torched a car belonging to a German who leads an EU task force on Greece. In relatively unscathed France, extremist parties captured 30% of the vote in this spring’s presidential elections.

ATHENS? I’d like you to meet Sacramento. The two of you should have a lot to chat about. Such as what to do when you’re in a burning building with no exits.

In California, efforts to close the budget deficit by taxing the rich resulted in the deficit shrinking from $9 billion all the way to $16 billion. Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed solution: Tax the rich even more (and tax everybody else, too, by hiking sales tax).

California contains about one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients (despite having 12% of the nation’s population) and is planning a high-speed rail system that will cost an estimated $68 billion, including $4 billion on a section The Los Angeles Times dubbed a “train to nowhere.” Its pension costs for public employees, 85% of them unionized, rose 2,000% in the first decade of this century, which is 1,976% more than revenues increased. A CEO survey in April ruled that California was the least business-friendly state in the US.

In 1999, when the state was flooded with dotcom tax revenue, it set in place a law, SB 400, that assumed the good times would continue forever and allowed government workers as young as 50 to retire on 90% of salary they earned in their final year, when they would ramp up the overtime. In order to cover these commitments through the CALPERS investment fund, the Dow Jones Industrial Average would have to be over 25,000 by now.

Pension and health-care spending for retirees are set to triple this decade. More than 12,000 state and local workers are collecting more than $100,000 a year in pensions. Even convicted felons can collect pensions.

Greek and Californian politicians made the same mistake: They wanted union backing so badly that they promised far more than they could ever deliver. They knew that they’d be long gone before the crisis kicked in, or maybe it would solve itself. Either way, they didn’t care. They were happy to use tomorrow’s seed corn to buy themselves power. California’s pension plans face a $500 billion hole in unfunded promises.

And speaking of California’s unions, at City Journal, Troy Senik invites us to observe (fortunately, at a distance far enough back so as to not to worry about the fists and brickbats), “The Worst Union in America — How the California Teachers Association betrayed the schools and crippled the state.” Senik describes the California Teachers Association as “the single most powerful special interest in California,” whose end product brings to mind Woody Allen’s classic Catskills-era riff at the beginning of Annie Hall – “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” “Yes I know — and such small portions.”

Related: Thomas Sowell predicts a Greece/California-style destiny for the rest of America:

Now that census data show — for the first time in American history — that the number of white babies born is exceeded by the number of babies born to non-white minorities, the question is: What does this mean for the future of American society?

Politically, it means that minorities who traditionally vote overwhelmingly for Democrats can ensure that the country veers ever further to the left over the years, making America more like the welfare states of Europe, whose unsustainable spending led ultimately to financial crises and widespread riots.

But this is not strictly a matter of whites versus non-whites. Jews vote consistently, and almost as overwhelmingly, for Democrats as blacks do. Moreover, Asian Americans are by no means as likely as other non-whites to vote for the class-warfare, tax-and-spend agenda of the Democrats.

Yet when all is said and done, the future political direction of the country seems painfully clear from these demographic trends, unless something happens to change the current correlation between race and political-party affiliation. Moreover, even that may not be enough.

Well, that’s something to look forward to.

2 Comments

Now is the time when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:

“Fatherland” was first conceived as a nonfiction book, this time about the Europe that Hitler dreamed of creating.

But a summer vacation in Sicily in 1987 changed his plan. “There were a lot of German tourists on the beach,” he said, “and if you closed your eyes, you could just imagine you were in the victorious German empire. Suddenly, everything came to me as a novel, the idea of a cover-up, a sequence of deaths, someone investigating them. I went splashing into the water, and by the time I came back onto the beach I had it written in my mind.”

– The New York Times’ 1995 profile of Robert Harris, the author of Fatherland, the Cold War-alternative history, and the WWII-era novel Enigma.

A fortnight or so ago – before setting off for Berlin on my quadriga-spotting tour – I heard the Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, on Radio 4 opine that what Europe really needed now was for Germany to, once again, take a proper responsibility for the continent’s security and vastly expand her armed forces, which, since 1945 have been a mere bundeswehr rump.

I nearly fell off my Brandenburg Gate of a chair: the whole point of the European project had been to bridle the bellicosity of her big powers – and in particular that proven troublemaker Germany – and that in this respect at least, the European Union represented one of the few examples in human history of the political classes of several nations acting selflessly and sensibly.

That these same politicians were afflicted by a strange sort of doublethink – both aspiring towards unity, and desperate for their own nationalistic electorates to preserve the substance of their sovereignties – was and is the peculiar vaulting horse upon which Europa’s crotch has now painfully descended.

For myself, I had always been an enthusiastic pro-European and an unashamed believer in a federal European state. Like many English people of my tastes and proclivities, I rather fancied myself propping up zinc bars, sipping pastis and listening to the musical chink-clank of petanque.

I viewed an increasingly united Europe as a necessary counterweight to US world hegemony and Russian idiocy, while also being a handy cosmopolitan stick with which to beat the backs of uptight Little Englanders.

But times and opinions change: the continent’s sixty year double-thinking reverie has turned the European dream into something of a nightmare: the quadriga’s remaining obstinately faced to the East has resulted in an unfeasible extension of the EU in that direction also, while the attempt to reconcile national sovereignty with a single European economy has resulted in a bloated bureaucracy full of the wind of its own democratic deficit.

– “The European Dream Has Become A Nightmare,” Will Self, the BBC, May 20th, 2012. As Orrin Judd writes in response, “Must be tough to admit that the Iron Lady understood things so much better than the left.”

At the Corner, Andrew Stuttaford has more on “Crumbling (Euro)land:”

In yet another article to be read with whisky and revolver loaded with a single bullet (for a slightly more cheery view try Roger Bootle here), the Daily Telegraph’s Jeremy Warner throws in his usual grim twist:

A bizarre money-go-round has developed, which works something like this. Fearing crippling property losses and a possible exit from the euro, the Spanish depositor removes his money from Spain and places it in an apparently “safe” German bank account. But unable to invest these inflows safely, the German bank places the money on deposit with the Bundesbank. Denied access to market funding, the Spanish bank taps the European Central Bank for the money instead, which in turn uses the excess liquidity building up at the Bundesbank. It’s unclear where the ultimate liability would lie in the event of default and/or exit from monetary union, but in all likelihood with the German taxpayer.

The German taxpayer, that is, who was never asked whether he wanted this nonsense currency in the first place.

For her part, Angela Merkel veers between steely prudence and the dream-language of grand schemes, the language of delusion and disaster:

In a speech this month, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, spoke of the euro in utopian terms as not just a currency. Rather, she said, it is a “schicksalsgemeinshaft”, or “community of destiny” that Germans are committed to seeing through, almost whatever the costs.

Stalingrad will be taken.

Heh.™

Finally, at the London Telegraph, Janet Daley writes, “Europe finally awakes from its utopian dream.” Considering that various European utopian dreams been the cause of most of the world’s ills since 1914, I’m sure they’ll have another all set to go, once the fail on this latest utopian dream reaches even more epic proportions.

4 Comments

The other night, I was watching a 1995-era History Channel show on the Nuremberg Trials — it was a classic case of clicking ’round the Roku box to see what was “new” at Netflix. I put “new” in quotation marks since so much of what’s available there in streaming format unfortunately consists of flotsam and jetsam I had either watched a decade or two ago, and/or shows I probably wouldn’t give the time of day to, except that the novelty of streaming video via the Internet still hasn’t worn off.

The History Channel show on the Nuremberg Trials mentioned in passing the Morgenthau Plan, a scheme for postwar Germany that was viciously punitive, if understandably so, and crafted by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., FDR’s  Treasury secretary, around 1944. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it:

The Morgenthau Plan, proposed by United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., advocated that the Allied occupation of Germany following World War II include measures to eliminate Germany’s ability to wage war.

• In the original proposal this was to be achieved in three main steps.
• Germany was to be partitioned into two independent states.
• Germany’s main centers of mining and industry, including the Saar area, the Ruhr area and Upper Silesia were to be internationalized or annexed by neighboring nations.
• All heavy industry was to be dismantled or otherwise destroyed.

At the Second Quebec Conference on September 16, 1944, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau, Jr. persuaded the initially very reluctant British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to agree to the plan, likely using a $6 billion Lend Lease agreement to do so. Churchill chose however to narrow the scope of Morgenthau’s proposal by drafting a new version of the memorandum, which ended up being the version signed by the two statesmen.

The memorandum concluded “is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.”

As that Wikipedia page goes on to note, cooler heads eventually prevailed after the war. Otherwise, just as East Germany traded one totalitarian regime for another, West Germany would have traded the nightmare of Hitler’s scorched earth policy when he knew the war was lost for the Allies’ own scorched earth policy afterwards. Wikipedia quotes former president Herbert Hoover, who reminded advocates of the Morgenthau Plan in 1947 that “There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a ‘pastoral state’. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.” West Germany would go on to become an industrial powerhouse, albeit one with a US military base located within it, just in case…

And while the Morgenthau Plan is now merely a footnote in history, ever since the late ’60s and early 1970s, the desire for punitive reprimitivization on a global scale has become all the rage amongst the wackier elements of the environmental left, including the fellow recently spotlighted by John Aziz at the Zero Hedge econo-blog, whom Aziz dubs “The Face of Genocidal Eco-Fascism”:

This is Finnish writer Pentti Linkola — a man who demands that the human population reduce its size to around 500 million and abandon modern technology and the pursuit of economic growth — in his own words.

He likens Earth today to an overflowing lifeboat:

What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.

He sees America as the root of the problem:

The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom.

He unapologetically advocates bloodthirsty dictatorship:

Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent a dictator that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. The best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and where government would prevent any economical growth.

We will have to learn from the history of revolutionary movements — the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades — and forget our narcissistic selves.

A fundamental, devastating error is to set up a political system based on desire. Society and life have been organized on the basis of what an individual wants, not on what is good for him or her.

Dude.

Or to put it a bit more articulately, “The ecochondriacs mean it: This’d be a pretty nice planet if we didn’t live here,” Mark Steyn wrote a few years ago, a quote we referenced back in 2008 rounding up additional examples of what James Taranto dubbed a few years later, “Green Supremacism.”

Linking to the above post at Zero Hedge, Glenn Reynolds responded this past Friday:

As Bob Zubrin has pointed out, such sentiments, if usually a bit less bluntly stated, are driving environmental policy nowadays. It’s Himmler in a green shirt. These are not nice people who want good things for everyone. These are evil people who hanker after mass death.

Still, it’s educational to hear things like this: “The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom.”

If you like growth and freedom, these people are your enemies. Remember that and treat them accordingly.

Responding to Linkola’s manifesto, John Aziz writes at Zero Hedge (and I urge you to read his whole post), “My suggestion for all such thinkers is that if they want to reduce the global population they should measure up to their words and go first.”

Pages: 1 2 | 69 Comments

As spotted by RD Brewer, one of Ace of Spades’ co-bloggers, who reads the Politico and the New York Times, so you don’t have to. As Brewer writes, “Emmy winner Campbell Brown, former CNN host and former co-anchor at of NBC’s Weekend Today, rapped President Obama for being condescending toward women:”

WHEN I listen to President Obama speak to and about women, he sometimes sounds too paternalistic for my taste. In numerous appearances over the years — most recently at the Barnard graduation — he has made reference to how women are smarter than men. It’s all so tired, the kind of fake praise showered upon those one views as easy to impress. As I listen, I am always bracing for the old go-to cliché: “Behind every great man is a great woman.”

. . .

The women I know who are struggling in this economy couldn’t be further from the fictional character of Julia, presented in Mr. Obama’s Web ad, “The Life of Julia,” a silly and embarrassing caricature based on the assumption that women look to government at every meaningful phase of their lives for help.

. . .

In an effort to win them back, Mr. Obama is trying too hard. He’s employing a tone that can come across as grating and even condescending. He really ought to drop it. Most women don’t want to be patted on the head or treated as wards of the state. They simply want to be given a chance to succeed based on their talent and skills. To borrow a phrase from our president’s favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, they want “an open field and a fair chance.”

At Ace of Spades, Brewer adds:

More and more high profile personalities are speaking out. It’s starting to look like an Abilene paradox is breaking down, and we’re at the beginning of a full-blown preference cascade, described by Glenn Reynolds here:

This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers – or even to the citizens themselves. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they’re also often true . . . .

(Emphasis added.) If it starts to look like Obama is likely to lose, the left will turn on him fast. He lied to them, and they’re not happy. It’ll be the president’s problem or the messaging or the packaging, not the philosophy. They will turn on him to preserve their worldview.

No matter what happens in November, even more will be speaking out in the coming years; lots of rubes will want to come clean.

Such as this one: “Wapo’s Kathleen Parker: Republican’s aren’t wrong that we never vetted Obama sufficiently:”

The subject on the Chris Matthews show was the right wanting to emphasis Obama’s relationship with Jeremiah Wright, which they all agreed was playing the ‘race card’ which is idiotic. Matthews brought up the fact that while Romney doesn’t want to talk about Wright, Hannity certainly wants him to as he said so this week. Parker responded:

Well yeah Sean Hannity wants him to, a lot of Republicans do, a lot of the sorta further right people feel like ‘look we never vetted Obama sufficiently’, talking about us the media, and to some extent they’re not wrong about that. They do feel that we pulled back on Rev. Wright…

Gee, Kathleen, what on earth would give them that idea?

4 Comments

Why, it’s as if there’s a tyranny of cliches that vexes the nation; Mike of the Cold Fury blog attempts to chart our “Topsy-turvy world:”

Okay, let me see if I have all this straight. Bill Clinton, a white Southerner, was the first black president. Obama, an apparently straight guy, is the first gay president. George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, is a white guy. Elizabeth Warren, the whitest white woman anybody ever saw, is an Injun.

Andrew Sullivan, a liberal, considers himself the last “true conservative.” The Democrat Socialists, left-wingers to a fault, consider themselves “centrist” or “moderate,” and Mitt Romney, who is a liberal, is a “right-wing extremist.” Of course, Mittens calls himself a “severe conservative,” although nobody really believes it. Not even the Democrat Socialists.

The overwhelming majority of people who call themselves “journalists” actually function as advocates, while laughably declaiming their unbiased impartiality to anyone gullible enough to buy it. Violent OWS revolutionaries are “mostly peaceful.” Layabouts who collect government benefits are “hard-working Americans,” and people who actually want to work but can’t find a job in the Obama Depression and have abandoned all hope aren’t even counted as unemployed at all. More than three straight years of economic stagnation in the Obama Depression is some kind of “recovery,” and as for the real people whose lives have been marred by the inevitable and predictable result of Obama’s muttonheaded policies, “you’d think they’d be saying thank you.”

Read the whole thing.

And then to see where it leads, click here.

Update: Related thoughts, expressed in visual form.

(Headline by Mr. E. Blair; found via SDA.)

Comments

We’ve already seen network TV newscasters, who make seven figure annual incomes taking shots at Mitt Romney’s weath, but late night entertainers earn much more, especially David Letterman, whose network career stretches back to the early 1980s, first with NBC, later with CBS. As Noel Sheppard writes at Newsbusters, “David Letterman Mocks Romney’s Wealth Despite Being Worth $400 Million:”

You want to see a perfect demonstration of almost unimaginable media hypocrisy?

On Friday, CBS Late Show host David Letterman mocked Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s wealth despite being worth $400 million embedded by Embedded Video
Download Video :

DAVID LETTERMAN: I was talking to Mitt Romney earlier today, and he and his family got a big two day weekend planned. They’re going to hike to the top of his money.

Excuse me, but who the heck is Letterman to ridicule anyone for how much money they have?

According to our friends at Celebrity Net Worth, the Late Show host makes $50 million a year with an estate valued at $400 million.

As Forbes estimated Romney’s net worth at $230 million Wednesday, Letterman’s worth almost twice the target of his derision.

How’s THAT for hypocrisy?

Sometimes Dave’s just not all that thoughtful, it seems.

Related: Bain or Bane?

5 Comments

As you may already know, The Amateur, Edward Klein’s great new book, gets its title from this exchange involving Bill and Hillary Clinton, debating in August of last year in Chappaqua, New York, whether or not Hillary should run against Obama:

Bill and Hillary were going at it again, fighting tooth and nail over their favorite subject: themselves.

It was a warm summer Sunday—a full year away from the 2012 Democratic National Convention—and Bill Clinton was urging Hillary to think the unthinkable. He wanted her to challenge Barack Obama for their party’s presidential nomination. No American politician had attempted to usurp a sitting president of his own party since Ted Kennedy failed to unseat Jimmy Carter more than thirty years before.

“Why risk everything now?” Hillary demanded to know.

“Because,” Bill replied, “the country needs you!”

* * * * * * * *

“I’m the highest-ranking member in Obama’s cabinet,” she pointed out. “I eat breakfast with the guy every Thursday morning. What about loyalty, Bill? What about loyalty?” “Loyalty is a joke,” Bill said. “Loyalty doesn’t exist in politics. There’s no such word in the political rulebook. I’ve had two successors since I left the White House—Bush and Obama—and I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama. I have no relationship with the president—none whatsoever. Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. He’s… he’s… ”

Bill’s voice was growing hoarse—he was speaking in a rough whisper—but he looked as though he could go on forever bashing Obama. And then, all at once and without warning, he stopped cold.

He bit his lower lip and scanned the faces in the room. He was plainly gratified to see that his audience was spellbound. They were waiting for the politician par excellence to deliver his final judgment on the forty-fourth president of the United States.

“Barack Obama,” said Bill Clinton, “is an amateur!”

Right now, Bill Clinton’s legacy is unique (well, besides being the only president impeached in the 20th century) in that he’s the first Democratic president to serve out a full second term since FDR. Truman’s time in office consisted of serving out the remainder of Roosevelt’s last term, followed by a first term of his own; he could have run again for office in ’52 had he not squandered his reputation in the interim years. (Going full Godwin on Thomas Dewey didn’t help matters.) JFK’s first term was tragically cut short, LBJ chose not to run again, Carter wasn’t reelected. Given the bad blood that exists between Bill and Barry, think the former and his elephantine ego is all that keen on the latter getting reelected? Which helps to explain “Bubba’s Hot Mic Moment,” as captured by the Washington Free Beacon on Tuesday:

Former president Bill Clinton told attendees at the Peter G. Peterson Fiscal Summit in Washington, D.C., today that President Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on the rich will not be enough to close the deficit and that middle-class taxes may also have to be raised.

“This is just me now, I’m not speaking for the White House—I think you could tax me at 100 percent and you wouldn’t balance the budget,” Clinton said, according to Politico’s account. “We are all going to have to contribute to this, and if middle class people’s wages were going up again, and we had some growth to the economy, I don’t think they would object to going back to tax rates when I was president.”

Clinton’s comments are sure to provoke a response from Republicans who argue that President Obama may increase taxes for all or even propose a value-added tax in a more flexible second term.

Similarly, this moment from Hillary, captured by CNS News the following day in a story titled “Hillary: ‘Government Cannot and Should Not Control Any Individual’s Life,’” is also a dual-edged sword of a statement:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, told an assemblage of human rights and “civil society” activists gathered at the State Department Wednesday that “government cannot and should not” control the lives of individuals.

“(T)o make the case for civil society is really quite simple because government cannot and should not control any individual’s life – tell you what to do, what not to do,” Clinton said, taking part in a “Global Dialogue of Civil Society.”

That seems like quite a change from the woman behind her namesake HillaryCare, who once said, “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” Her statement this week, coupled with her husband does seem curious in light of their dissatisfaction — shared by seemingly just about all but the Professional Left, as Robert Gibbs* would say — with The Amateur.

* Who would also grow increasingly exasperated by the Amateur-Hour atmosphere in the Obama White House by the end of his tenure there, according to Klein.

3 Comments

“Sometimes you do wonder if [Republicans] are moles, Manchurian candidates for I don’t know who, if their real job is to bring down America.”

– Paul Krugman, appearing on MSNBC’s Martin Bashir Show yesterday.

Man, I wish you guys would make up your minds — Thomas Friedman wants us to be more like China (after previously wishing we were more like Cuba), even as Krugman has visions in his sleep of Laurence Harvey and the bald guy who later played Wo Fat in Hawaii Five-O. Meanwhile, Frank Rich (before he left the Times) imagined the GOP in late 2009 to be “Stalinists.” And that’s after the Times shilled for Stalin’s Soviet Union, and “Pinch” Sulzberger, their publisher, at least in his radical chic salad days, for communist Vietnam.

Given what a momentous development for a then-Timesman like Rich to use the word “Stalinist” as a pejorative, I did a Silicon Graffiti video titled “The Pinchurian Candidate” to document the occasion. Perhaps it’s worth revisiting in light of Krugman’s latest argument ad hominem.

Best to play a little solitaire while watching, though…

Comments

In his latest column, Mark Steyn navigates through “Eternally shifting sands of Obama’s biography,” along with a soupçon of the  crab with tomato mayonnaise from Elizabeth Warren’s Pow Wow Chow cookbook:

“I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then,” says Nick Carraway in “The Great Gatsby.” “His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people – his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself… . So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

In a post-modern America, the things that Gatsby attempted to fake – an elite schooling – Obama actually had; the things that Gatsby attempted to obscure – the impoverished roots – merely add to Obama’s luster. Gatsby claimed to have gone to Oxford, but nobody knew him there because he never went; Obama had a million bucks’ worth of elite education at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law, and still nobody knew him (“Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him”). In that sense, Obama out-Gatsbys Gatsby: His “shiftless and unsuccessful” relatives – the deportation-dodging aunt on public housing in Boston, the DWI undocumented uncle, the $12-a-year brother back in Nairobi – are useful props in his story, the ever more vivid bit-players as the central character swims ever more out of focus, but they don’t seem to know him either. The more autobiographies he writes, the less anybody knows.

Like Gatsby presiding over his wild, lavish parties, Obama is aloof and remote: let everyone else rave deliriously; he just has to be. He is, in his way, the apotheosis of the Age of American Incredibility. When just being who you are anyway is an incredible accomplishment, Obama managed to run and win on biography almost entirely unmoored from life. But then, like Gatsby, he knew a thing or two about “the unreality of reality.”

Man Men’s Don Draper is a sort Gatsby-as-everyman; he’s not quite as wealthy as Jay Gatsby, and while his duplex Manhattan apartment in the new season is certainly swank, it’s not exactly a mansion on Long Island’s North Shore. But the idea that one can be born dirt poor in the heartland and reinvent yourself to reach the top of New York society is certainly similar. As I wrote in July of 2008, Obama is the very personification of Mad Men’s identikit philosophy, espoused in the show’s first season by Robert Morse’s Bert Cooper character:

“A man is whatever room he is in” — that’s a remarkably timely phrase right about now, isn’t it?

It’s even more so, seeing the Ministry of Truth-level airbrushing that Obama has done to his biography over the years. In 2008, like Don Draper, Obama at his best was a master salesman, and both are handsome men who know their way around a Lucky, a Brooks Brothers suit, and a skinny tie. But in real-life, the best ad men know that the product has to be equal to the ad campaign, or customer disappointment will be palpable. Or as Mad Men series advisor Jerry Della Femina wrote over 40 years ago in his classic book on advertising, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front-Line Dispatches from the Advertising War:

There is a great deal of advertising that’s better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster. There have been cases where the product had to come up to the advertising but when the product fails to do that, the advertiser will eventually run into a lot of trouble.

A few years later, Cavett Robert, the founder of the National Speaker’s Association would advise clients in his profession, “Don’t be in too much of a hurry to promote, until you get good. Otherwise you just speed up the rate at which the world finds out you’re no good.” That’s the story of Edward Klein’s new book, The Amateur. Each chapter is features a different liberal clique (such as black and Jewish voters) or elitists (Oprah and the Kennedy clan) who embraced Obama in 2008, only to find out that they were sold a bill of goods, that Obama was only in it for himself, and that Obama either didn’t understand how Washington worked, or thought that through sheer force of ego, he could bend it to his will. Here’s a representative sample, early on in Klein’s book:

Shortly after Obama entered the White House, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner warned him, “Your legacy is going to be preventing the second Great Depression.” To which Obama boasted, “That’s not enough for me.”

* * * * * * * *

On the evening of Tuesday, June 30, 2009, Barack Obama invited nine like-minded liberal historians to have dinner with him in the Family Quarters of the White House. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, personally delivered the invitations to each historian with a word of caution: the dinner was to remain private and off the record….At the time of this dinner, Barack Obama was still enjoying a honeymoon period with the American people. According to the most recent Gallup Poll, 63 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing. Not surprisingly, he was in an expansive mood as he tucked into his lamb chops and went around the table questioning each historian by name—Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, Robert Caro, Robert Dallek, David Brinkley, H. W. Brands, David Kennedy, Kenneth Mack, and Gary Wills.

* * * * * * * *

Tonight, in front of nine prominent American historians, Obama wasn’t shy about flaunting his famous self-confidence. He intended to bring the Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table and create a permanent peace in the Middle East. He would open a constructive dialogue with America’s enemies in Iran and North Korea and, through his powers of persuasion, help them see the error of their ways. He’d pass legislation in Washington to revolutionize the country’s healthcare system and energy policy. And he’d inject the regulatory hand of the federal government into the American economy in an effort to create “a more just and equitable society.” When several of the historians brought up the difficulties that Lyndon Johnson had faced trying to wage a foreign war while implementing an ambitious domestic agenda, Obama grew testy. He knew better. He could prevail by the force of his personality. He could solve the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, put millions of people back to work, redistribute wealth, withdraw from Iraq, and reconcile the United States to a less dominant role in the world.

It was, by any measure, a breathtaking display of narcissistic grandiosity from a man whose entire political curriculum vitae consisted of seven undistinguished years in the Illinois Senate, two mostly absent years in the United States Senate, and five months and ten days in the White House. Unintentionally, Obama revealed the characteristics that made him totally unsuited for the presidency and that would doom him to failure: his extreme haughtiness and excessive pride; his ideological bent as a far-left corporatist; and his astounding amateurism.

Compare that Hindenburg-sized level of hubris to the ad that Mitt Romney’s campaign rolled out today, to broach the idea of President Romney’s first day in office (as Mollie Hemingway asks at Ricochet, “Did You Just Say ‘President Romney?’”) No Styrofoam columns and lowering of the Red Sea here, in contrast, doable initial achievements:

Beyond the laundry list, there’s the tone of the ad. Perhaps Hugh Hewitt should reissue his 2007 book which invites us to imagine A Mormon in the White House under a new title: A Grown-Up in the White House.

It would make for a refreshing change. But do the American people want one there again?

3 Comments

The World Wildlife Federation, who along with a little help from Fairfax Media, a major media conglomerate in Australia and New Zealand, has made Earth Hour an annual eco-pagan “holiday” amongst the far left (including businesses either dumb enough to play along, or perhaps in the hopes of appeasement). But that isn’t their only effort at playing Chicken Little. This year, they managed to convince the New York Daily News (a center-left paper that should know better) to run an article titled “Two Earths would be needed to sustain human activity by 2030, report finds,” that’s really a glorified press release for the WWF:

Planet Earth in a tight spot.

Mankind is draining the earth’s resources so quickly the globe would be bled dry before the end of the century at this rate, a new report shows.

Humans are living outside their means, depleting natural resources like forests, air and water 50% faster than the planet can renew, according to the 2012 World Wildlife Fund’s “Living Planet Report” released this month.

If the trends aren’t reversed, by 2030 we’d need more than two Planet Earths to sustain human activity, according to the study.

“If we just do business as usual…we’re just going to continue moving in this direction. At some point, the earth’s going to just give out. We don’t know when. But that’s a pretty scary thing to think about,” said Colby Loucks, director of conservation science at WWF. “The question is, we don’t know what the tipping point is.”

But you sure know how to shout doomsday on a regular basis. In 2009, the WWF commissioned this ad, in both still and video versions, which they pulled at the last minute, perhaps risking the backlash from the general public over a form of agitprop that James Taranto once dubbed, “Green Supremacism:”

Having exploited 9/11 to play the Moral Equivalent of War cliche, a couple of months later, the WWF decided to use children as human shields for their next campaign:

That 2030 date randomly chosen by the WWF’s latest “report” is interesting — it’s at least far enough out that most people will have forgotten it by the time it arrives, unlike all of the “we only have five years/ten years/four years to save the earth” cri de coeurs, many of which date from the Bush administration era, and are coming due, and making the enviro-socialists who issued them look particularly silly. But it’s close enough to scare those who wish to be scared by the latest Malthusian doomsday scenario.

Pages: 1 2 | 11 Comments

As John Hinderaker writes at Power Line, “Senate Democrats Achieve a New Standard of Irresponsibility:”

The Senate voted on five budgets today, at the insistence of Republican senators. The result was revealing: no Senate Democrat voted in favor of any budget. This is consistent, of course, with the fact that the Democrat-led Senate has refused to adopt a budget, in violation of federal law, for the last three years. Still, it is a little shocking to see that not a single Democrat was willing to vote in favor of anybudget, even the most irresponsible.

President Obama’s budget fared the worst; it lost, 99-0. This means that the presidents FY 2013 budget has now been rejected by the House and Senate by a combined vote of 513-0. Earlier today, as Paul noted in a post a little while ago, Obama demanded a “serious bipartisan approach” to the nation’s budgetary crisis. Bipartisan? He can’t even get a single Democrat to support his radically irresponsible proposals.

Why President Obama’s fellow Democrats hate him so? (Why, you could fill a book with that topic.)

2 Comments

Remember the Audi “Green Police” ad from the Super Bowl in February of 2010? When “armed Environmental Police officers” and a “state Environmental Police truck” (an SUV, to add to the Gorewellian levels of irony) appear in a Massachusetts* newspaper article, what was fiction only a couple of years ago has now become reality. But then, as President Zelig Lemon Mood Ring demonstrates, reality is entirely fungible these days:

Looking to hit the spot with a savory ice cream at Great Brook Farm State Park this week?

You may be out of luck.

The park’s popular ice-cream stand was unexpectedly shut down by state officials over the weekend, after the stand’s operator made building improvements at the site without getting permission first.

Mark Duffy, who has operated the dairy farm at the state-owned park for 26 years and has a lease with the state to run the stand, said armed Environmental Police officers showed up at stand on Friday evening and stood guard throughout the weekend, turning away customers craving delectable sundaes and frappes.

To make matters worse, said Duffy, the shutdown happened right before the sunny Mother’s Day weekend.

Good thing he didn’t try to open a lemonade stand — that’s a capital offense these days.

* I knew it had to be Massachusetts or California as soon as I saw the story on the Drudge Report.

Related: At the Corner, Peter Kirsanow dubs America “Oceania Light,” a reminder that George Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, not as a user’s guide, which is what it’s morphed into over the last 20 years — with more than a little touch of the Weimar Republic, of course.

4 Comments

Veteran public speaker Cavett Robert was fond of telling newcomers, “Don’t be in too much of a hurry to promote, until you get good. Otherwise you just speed up the rate at which the world finds out you’re no good.”

The Tea Party was born spontaneously in early 2009 but, with the exception of CNBC’s Rick Santelli, received little public support from the MSM (almost entirely the opposite, and that’s understating the case, as we all know). Unfortunately, Occupy Wall Street had far more ink than it knew what to do with in its early days last fall, thanks to an overwhelming superfluity of promoters in the legacy media who, along with Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and other Democrat politicians, were desperate to have a Tea Party-style movement of their own. Well, besides, as Glenn Reynolds noted last year, “the Coffee Party, the Brownbaggers, The Other 95%, A New Way Forward, the One Nation Movement— am I leaving any out? I can’t remember.”

Walter Russell Mead (who reminds us that he much prefers his tea “tasted with pinkies appropriately extended in the proper, traditional way”) pronounces OWS RIP today:

To some degree, it was killed by its “friends.” The tiny left wing groups that exist in the country jumped all over the movement; between them and the deranged and occasionally dangerous homeless people and other rootless wanderers drawn to the movement’s increasingly disorderly campsites, OWS looked and sounded less and less like anything the 99 percent want anything to do with. At the same time, the movement largely failed to connect with the African American and Hispanic churchgoers who would have to be the base for any serious grass roots urban political mobilization. The trade unions picked up the movement briefly but dropped it like a hot brick as they found the brand less and less attractive.

It is as if the Tea Party had been taken over by the Aryan Brotherhood and delusional vagrants while failing to connect with either evangelical Christians or respectable libertarians. The MSM at one point was visibly hungering and thirsting for exactly that fate of marginalization to happen to the Tea Party, and the MSM did its klutzy best to tar the Tea Party with that kind of Mad Hatter extremism. The Tea Partiers by and large (not always or cleanly) escaped the fatal embrace of the nutters and the ranters on their side of the spectrum; OWS was occupied by its own fringe, and so died.

OWS’s popularity continues to plummet. Many pollsters haven’t even bothered to ask the public about OWS since the protestors were kicked out of Zuccotti Park. The NBC/WSJ poll, one of the only reliable indicators of OWS support these days, shows OWS’s popularity has dropped by half since November. Over the same period NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg’s popularity has remained steady months after closing the sad and futile encampment at Zuccotti Park. No backlash there.

Of course, as Jonah Goldberg has written, what Occupy really needs (needed?) is a Republican president to protest against. At least during the mid-1960s, the nascent new left railed against LBJ, causing him to ultimately resign. If any Occupiers called for Obama’s resignation, I missed it; perhaps sensing that they would only speed up the preference cascade against him, the legacy media, despite going all in (and I mean, all in) for OWS, certainly didn’t play up any quotes along similar lines. Instead, we had the first “revolution” raging for the machine.

Pages: 1 2 | 19 Comments

I downloaded Edward Klein’s new book The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House last night and started reading it on the Kindle; I certainly hope he’s got the documentation to verify all of his quotes, because it’s simply a devastating book. One early Obama biographer quoted the future president as saying, “You know, I actually believe my own bulls***.” Rest assured, Klein is one of the rare journalists — rarer even still a former Newsweek and New York Times editor — who doesn’t — and he goes out of his way to find those who share similar views of Mr Obama.

Based on Klein’s research, and the quotes from those who’ve associated themselves with Obama at one point or another in his life, not surprisingly at this point in time, and pace the title of the Phil Spector song, to know the president is not to love him. The result if a laugh-aloud funny book, popping the gas out of the Hindenburg-sized ego of Mr. Obama on almost every page. (As you may know, the title of Klein’s book comes from an early quote regarding Obama from Bill Clinton; it speaks volumes when Obama makes Bill and Hillary appear as the grown-ups in the room.)

Yesterday, Power Line quoted this excerpt from Klein’s book:

He also had a run-in with Steven Rogers, a wealthy businessman who became the Gund Family Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Early in his campaign for the U.S. Senate he gave Mr Obama $3,000 and arranged for thousands more dollars to be donated to him on one condition: he come and speak at the school when he got elected.

After becoming a Senator Mr Obama is said to have gone back on his offer because he was too busy and told Mr Rogers: ‘Come on man, you should know better when politicians make promises’.

In a furious tirade Mr Rogers screamed at him: ‘You’re a dirty rotten m*****f*****. What kind of s*** are you trying to pull? F*** you, you big-eared m*****f*****.’

A year later Mr Obama finally showed up but by then Mr Rogers’ had all but written him off as a friend.

As John Hinderaker added in response:

That strikes me as a wonderfully revealing anecdote. “Come on, man. You should know better when politicians make promises.” Have we ever seen a politician as cynical as Barack Obama? I can’t think of one offhand. Compared to Obama, Richard Nixon was an idealist.

Meanwhile, the New York Post quotes a much longer passage from Klein’s book, showcasing an epic cat fight between Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey:

However, by the time Oprah and Gayle landed in Washington a month after the election, Oprah’s relationship with the Obamas had come unglued.

OPRAH had tried to ignore the ominous change in tone coming from the Obama transition team. As Barack Obama’s inauguration drew near, Oprah’s calls to Michelle went unreturned.

Instead, Oprah heard from Max Doebler, the newly appointed White House ceremonies coordinator, who told Oprah that she needed to talk to him first about the interview. What’s more, Doebler said, Oprah had to run her interview questions past Jeff Stephens, a deputy speech writer, for prior approval.

“It was a pain as far as Oprah was concerned,” said a high-ranking executive of Harpo Studios, Oprah’s production company. “Oprah isn’t a snob, but she doesn’t like having to put up with mid-level clerks. These guys were $75,000-a-year men. Oprah was like, ‘Hello, what is this s–t!’

“But she did it; she went to Washington with Gayle and met with both Doebler and Stephens to hash out the details. I was surprised that she went there, hat in hand.”

It soon became apparent that something had gone wrong between Oprah and the new administration — or, more precisely, between Oprah and Michelle Obama.

The problem seemed to originate from two of Michelle’s advisers, Valerie Jarrett and Desirée Rogers, the new White House social secretary. They resented Oprah’s meddling in their bailiwick. Among other things, Oprah had a plan to redecorate the Lincoln bedroom. She also had ideas about how Michelle could put more zing into White House social events.

As the person who controlled access to the first couple, Valerie Jarrett saw Oprah as a potential threat to her power. If Oprah went unchecked, she would bypass Valerie and go directly to the president and first lady. What good was it being the gatekeeper if you couldn’t lock the gate when you wanted? And so Valerie set about turning Michelle against Oprah. Oprah was too close to the president . . . Oprah was acting like she was the first lady . . . Oprah didn’t know her place . . . Oprah was a bad influence . . . Valerie advised Michelle to “distance herself” from Oprah and cut her out of the White House inner circle.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

ACCORDING to sources, Oprah told Gayle King that she felt like getting Michelle on the phone and really letting her have it. Oprah raged: “Michelle hates fat people and doesn’t want me waddling around the White House!”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

“Oprah only wants to cash in, using the White House as a backdrop for her show to perk up her ratings,” Michelle was quoted as telling her staff. “Oprah, with her yo-yo dieting and huge girth, is a terrible role model. Kids will look at Oprah, who’s rich and famous and huge, and figure it’s OK to be fat.”

Oprah went through the roof when she heard about Michelle’s remarks. “If Michelle thinks I need more fame and money,” said Oprah, “she’s nuts.”

At the risk of using a cliche thoroughly deconstructed in one of the latter chapters of Jonah Goldberg’s new book, this is one time where karma meets dogma — certainly ideology at least — and karma may have won out.

I’m only a few chapters into The Amateur, but based upon what I’ve read, it’s certainly worth picking up, and may well contribute to what — at least at the moment — appears to be an accelerating preference cascade that’s working against the president.

3 Comments

“There is a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hand, saying that they’re going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses,” Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-New York, told the chief executive officers of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee.

“It’s almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. It kind of makes you a little bit suspicious.”

He added, “couldn’t you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here? It would have at least sent a message that you do get it.”

– “Big Three auto CEOs flew private jets to ask for taxpayer money,” CNN, November 19, 2008.

• “President Barack Obama’s broadside against giving corporate jet owners a tax break scored him some populist points while potentially saving taxpayers $3 billion over the next decade.”

– “Obama’s Private-Jet Offensive,” the Daily Beast, June 30th, 2011.

• “Obama aide promises $1B in corporate-jet subsidies.”

– Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner, today.

1 Comment

The Huffington Post reports: “Mitt Romney: Obama Spending Has Fanned ‘Prairie Fire Of Debt:’”

Republican Mitt Romney says President Barack Obama’s reckless spending has fanned a “prairie fire of debt” while portraying himself in a speech in battleground Iowa as the defender of fiscal responsibility.

The likely GOP presidential nominee is trying to frame his campaign against the Democratic president as a contest of fairness versus irresponsibility.

In a speech Tuesday afternoon in Iowa, Romney will say that, in his words, “a prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation and every day we fail to act we feed that fire with our own lack of resolve.”

A “Prairie Fire,” you say? Could be a coincidence, or it could be a reference to what my fellow PJ Columnist Zombie dug up in October of 2008 — “William Ayers’ forgotten communist manifesto: Prairie Fire:”

As Zombie noted back then, this was the title of one of Ayers’ Weather Underground manifestos. Click over for numerous scanned pages, including:

The following snippet is taken from the book’s dedication page, and shows that the Weather Underground dedicated the book to Robert F. Kennedy’s killer Sirhan Sirhan, among many other now-obscure ’60s-era radicals, criminals and revolutionaries:

Anybody told Ethel and Caroline of this book’s existence, or Ayers’ relationship to Obama?

11 Comments